Jan 28, 2014
As a two cup a day coffee drinker and three cup a day green tea drinker, I have to work really hard to maintain a white smile. Fortunately there are a whole plethora of products on the market that make it a lot easier. Combined with some tips and tricks I’ve learned through the years, keeping my smile stain-free is pretty easy. Here are my top five tips for whiter teeth.
1. Drink Through a Straw – A friend and I were at Starbucks one day when she ordered her coffee with a straw. At first, I thought she was crazy until she explained that drinking coffee and tea through a straw gives it less contact with your teeth. Genius! You might feel silly doing this at first, but trust me, it works.
2. Use an Electric Toothbrush – Electric toothbrushes are best for removing the deeply imbedded surface stains on teeth. I was amazed at the difference in my teeth when I switched to using one. My affordable yet effective favorite is the Philips Sonicare Essence.
3. Touch Up with Whitening Strips – I wore braces for almost five years as an adult. After they were removed, I got one of those expensive whitening treatments done by my dentist. It was very effective but I’ve had to maintain it with touch ups. I’ve had the best results with Crest 3D Whitestrips Intensive Professional Effects. After my daughter got her braces removed last year, we used these to whiten her smile. They were just as effective as the expensive treatment I got but for a lot less.
4. Brush with Whitening Toothpaste – This one is a no-brainer but using whitening toothpaste on a daily basis really does make a difference. Just make sure it’s the right one. I’m not kidding when I say that I’ve tried almost every whitening toothpaste on the market. Hands down the best results I’ve gotten in both whitening and preventing stains is Crest 3D White Luxe Glamorous White Toothpaste. It’s removes up to 90% of surface stains in five days.
5. Fake it With Bronzer – You know how your teeth look whiter when you have a tan? You can fake a brighter smile year-round with a facial bronzer or sunless tanner. Sunless tanner applied to your face makes teeth and the whites of your eyes look brighter. Bare Minerals Faux Tan Face gradually develops into a natural looking tan and won’t clog pores or cause breakouts.
It’s Your Turn: What tips do you have for a whiter, brighter smile? Share them in the comments.
BEAUTY BUZZ LINK UP
It’s time to link up your beauty posts for this week’s Beauty Buzz link up. Join me along with Lulu of Simply Lulu Style, Nicole of MomTrends and Janise of Mama in Heels to connect, share and sparkle!
Janise is hosting this week, link up HERE.
Jan 27, 2014
Wow, thank you so much for the overwhelmingly positive response to my daily style pics! It’s been fun documenting them on Instagram and sharing them here. I’m glad you like them.
A lot of you have asked what I’m wearing, so I’m going to start providing links to same or similar items under each outfit. Some pieces are last season or older but I’ll try my best to find suitable substitutes.
Without further ado, here are last week’s outfit entries into my Daily Style Diary.
Day One
A pleasant day in the 70’s! I wore a sheer polka dot blouse with a layering tank, my favorite skinny jeans from Forever 21 and leopard print flats to run errands.
[Blouse/Jeans/Necklace/Flats]
Day Two
Brr, it got cold quickly. For lunch with a friend, I wore this gray and cream sweater with a layering tank, plum coated denim skinnies and a long tassel necklace.
[Sweater/Jeans/Necklace]
Day Three
An afternoon at the horse barn called for a long sleeved tee, boyfriend cardigan, gray skinny jeans and Hunter Wellies. I wore the necklace to run errands but took it off before we went to the barn. Ava was so happy that I wore appropriate footwear for chasing horses in the pasture. I was too. 🙂
[Sweater/Shirt/Jeans/Necklace/Boots]
Day Four
Awards assembly at the elementary school. Gray cashmere sweater, white button down, blush jeans, statement necklace and riding boots.
[Sweater/Jeans/Necklace/Blouse/Boots]
Day Five
Took Chick-fil-a lunches to both of the girls at school. I wore my new beige sweater from Scissortail Clothing and scarf from Bindya NY with my favorite Paige jeans.
[Sweater/Scarf/Jeans/Boots]
Life Lately
Some snippets from our daily life.
- Still waiting to hear back from Devon’s first choice college. He’s gotten two acceptances so far and has a perfectly fine back-up plan…that’s also closer to home. 🙂 But it’s nerve wracking to check the mail every day. Tom Petty was right, the waiting IS the hardest part.
- Ava got three semester awards last week – one for A/B honor roll, one for Stellar Scientist and one for helping out in the office. Super proud of her!
- We’ve been trying to eat cleaner this past week. For the most part, it’s been OK but now I’m starting to feel like I will rip someone’s head off if I don’t get some Mexican food!
- Bailey, our golden retriever, got a trip to Petsmart for a shave down, nail trimming and teeth cleaning. She also got a big pink bow when she was all done. Good girl.
It’s Your Turn: What’s going on in your world this week?
Check my other Daily Mom Style outfits HERE.
Getting my pretty on with Fashion Friday, Totally Posted Tuesday and Style Sessions.
Jan 24, 2014
Happy Friday, pretties! I’ve got good news and bad news today. Let’s get the bad news out of the way first. This will be the last Next Thing You Need post for awhile.
Now for the good news…I’m replacing it with a fun new series that was YOUR idea.
In my reader survey, you asked for more wardrobe essentials posts. You want to know the pieces I keep going back to in order to create casual, chic outfit combos. (Lots of you actually used the word “chic”, I kind of like that!)
In my new series, I’ll be showing you some of my favorite brands of casual, chic outfit building blocks, along with different price points for each. I’ll also be giving you inspiration for pairing each piece up in new and fresh ways to create lots of outfit options.
Sound good?
I haven’t decided on a series name yet, but if you have any suggestions, please leave them in the comments! I’d love to hear them.
Now back to today’s business.
Let’s start with a little story about my first experience with monograms.
Christmas 1983. I was 10 years old. Go ahead, do the math. Under the tree was a beautiful red sweater with my initials embroidered on the front. I unwrapped it and immediately told my mom she needed to return it because they had my initials backwards – AHN instead of ANH. She laughed and explained that it’s supposed to be that way. The last initial goes in the middle!
After her little monogramming lesson, I decided to keep the sweater and ended up adoring it. To this day it is still one of my all-time favorite pieces of clothing I’ve ever owned.
It looked a lot like this but red.
[Via Pinterest, Source Removed]
Well I couldn’t be more delighted that monograms are making a big comeback. And not just in the south, although they’re way bigger here and have been for awhile. Some of my favorite retailers like C. Wonder, Pottery Barn and J. Crew have monogram shops. Nordstrom is also offering more monogrammed and personalized items and Etsy is an excellent source of all things monogrammed.
Monogrammed items make a perfect gift too. Let me ask, have you ever gotten a personalized gift that you didn’t love? What a minute, maybe you have. I know I’ve been on the wrong end of a few gifts from Things Remembered! But you know what I mean. Something with your initials is uniquely yours.
I guess that’s why I loved that red sweater so much.
Here are some great monogrammed and personalized items. Don’t worry, none of them are from Things Remembered.
[1/2/3/4/5/6/7]
A piece that I’ve been wearing almost daily that reminds me of my beloved monogrammed sweater is this necklace.
[Monogrammed Necklace c/o Onecklace]
Onecklace is offering a discount to GYPO readers. Get 10% off your order with coupon code GIFT at Onecklace.com. The quality is great and shipping was fast. I promise you’ll want to wear this necklace every day!
It’s Your Turn: Do you own any monogrammed items? Tell me in the comments.
Jan 22, 2014
Last week, I sent out my very first reader survey. When the responses started to roll in, I got that same feeling that I used to get right before a performance review at my corporate job. The butterflies, the sweaty palms, the fear of finding out what you all really think of me.
The great news is, it wasn’t that scary after all. You guys are truly the sweetest, nicest, most helpful and BEST READERS EVER! Even when you did offer criticism or suggestions for improvement (which I asked for), you did it in the most constructive and helpful way possible. And the positive feedback? Well it completely overwhelmed me. I am so humbled and honored to be able to share this blog with you.
On to the results!
The top five pieces of feedback I got were the following:
#1 – You want more personal posts.
This was hands-down the biggest request. You have NO idea how happy this makes me! This was something that I had no clue you wanted more of. There are so many things that I wanted to share here but just skipped out on it because I didn’t know if you’d be interested. But I’ve been dying to tell you! Life is exciting right now – our son just got his first acceptance letters for college and we’re scheduling visits. We’ve had our challenges too – our daughter made the decision to quit gymnastics after ten years. Lots of changes and transitions going on. There are so many more things I want to share with you guys and I’m beyond excited that you actually want to hear about them!
#2 – You want less sponsored content.
A million times THANK YOU for being honest about this. The last thing I want to do is be inauthentic or sales-y. Yuck. I would totally suck as a salesperson, that’s why I’ve never been one. 🙂 Please forgive me if I turned you off with sponsored posts and most of all, thank you for sticking around if I did. I totally get it now and my goal is to strike a better balance.
I wish I could blog for free, I really do. For the most part I did up, until I got laid off last year. While I am first and foremost a personal blogger, I am also a digital publisher. I’ve had the privilege of being accepted into some pretty awesome publishing networks like BlogHer. They provide me with an opportunity to supplement our family’s income through blogging. The primary way my blog makes money is through sponsored content and ads. Affiliate sales are just a small percentage. Most readers are here for inspiration, not to buy anything, and that’s perfectly fine. But it does put me in a position where I have to post sponsored content sometimes. Otherwise, blogging can be an expensive hobby and I’m not in a position to have one of those right now. Especially with a kid going off to college in a few months!
Having said that, monetization is important but what good is it if nobody wants to read your blog? This has slapped me upside the head. Unfortunately some sponsored content is a necessary evil but I will try my hardest to only accept opportunities that tie in well with what you want more of. Much like flipping through the ads in a magazine or DVR’ing your favorite show and skipping the commercials, feel free to only read what you like here too. I won’t mind at all! Just don’t let it be something that keeps you away for good.
#3 -You like that I interact with you.
If not for this community, there wouldn’t be a blog! You truly are what makes this worthwhile. If you’re a reader who doesn’t comment because you don’t see me responding in the comments section, I want you to know that I respond to every single comment that I get through e-mail (or by visiting your blog, if you’re a blogger). My reason for doing it through e-mail is because I can get more personal and I know that you’ll read them. Not everyone goes back to a blog post to see if they got a response on their comment. I love connecting through the e-mails we send back and forth and have made many new friends through my comments section, some that have become real-life friends.
#4 -You’re here for the outfits.
By a landslide, outfit posts were the winner with 80% of respondents preferring them most of all. The runners-up were beauty, trend watches, home decor and health. I hear you loud and clear and will be giving you more of what you want and less of what you don’t!
#5 – You want casual, affordable, easy to put together, age-appropriate outfits, that fit your body well.
Amen sisters! My goal is to create effortless outfits that are affordable and on trend, yet completely age-appropriate. A lot of you also mentioned fit and dressing for your body type as challenges. I’ll be more aware of that and try to offer options and advice for fit when I can.
Many of you also mentioned wanting to see more casual outfits. So, on Monday I started a Daily Style Diary post of my photos on Instagram to show you my outfits I’m wearing for everyday. I can’t promise you there will be one every single day but I’ll try to post as many as I can. You can find the outfits I’ve posted so far by searching hash tag #dailymomstyle.
Again, thank you for your honesty and candor. Your kind responses were just simply overwhelming. The fashion and beauty challenges that you shared have given me so many ideas for future posts and I couldn’t be more excited to dig into them. I want this to be a place you enjoy coming to every day where we can be friends talking about style, beauty and all of the things that girlfriends love to share.
[Trench: c/o eShakti (similar)/Sweater: Loft/Jeans: Paige/Scarf: American Eagle (similar)/Boots: c/o Wallis/Watch: c/o Fossil/Earrings: c/o Zocorra/Sunglasses: Ray-Ban]
I FEEL PRETTY
It’s the day of the week at GYPO where we celebrate what makes us feel pretty. Whether it’s a new outfit, hairstyle, or makeup, the I Feel Pretty link up is about anything and everything that makes your life prettier. Even if you’re not a blogger, you can still play along. Just tell us what made you feel pretty this week in the comments!
There are just a few simple rules:
1. Follow GYPO. (Facebook, Twitter, Bloglovin‘)
2. Link up your pretty post.
3. Link back to my blog (using the button above or your own link).
4. Visit other pretty peeps.
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Getting my pretty on with Fashion Friday, Fashion Informant, What I’m Loving Friday, Friday’s Fab Favorites, What I Wore to Work, Tres Chic Thursday, The Pleated Poppy and Shanna.
Jan 21, 2014
Although I haven’t talked much about it on the blog, I used to regularly work as an actress and print model in Dallas. It was a big part of my life for eight years. In that time, I appeared in close to 40 commercials, a dozen independent and industrial films and countless print shoots and theater performances. Most of the time the hours were long and the pay wasn’t that great (which is probably why I don’t do it anymore!). But there were a lot of bright spots through the years. One of which was getting to work with some highly talented stylists and makeup artists. I honestly owe most of my style and beauty know-how to them.
Even though I never worked on any big studio productions, I was fortunate enough to have some A-list makeup artists. They worked with a few people you may have heard of like Nicole Kidman, Julia Roberts, Sandra Bullock, Matthew McConaughey and Barack Obama. A word of advice, if any of you ever get to be A-list celebrities, BE NICE to makeup artists. Most of them love to dish dirt on the stars they’ve worked with. Oh, the stories I could tell! But I won’t because they’re not very nice. 🙂
I owe so much to these professionals. They taught me how to pick the right foundation color and grow back my overly waxed eyebrows (Biotin, it works!). They also showed me how curling lashes creates brighter and more open eyes and how to mix the right lip glosses and lip sticks to create the perfect shade.
Today, I’m going to let you in on five of my favorite tips learned from makeup artists.
Five Makeup Artist Tips…For the Rest of Us
Tip #1 – Always use a primer.
I can honestly say that this one product has gotten me countless compliments on my skin over the past few years. Simply put, primer fakes great skin. It hides little imperfections, smooths over lines and makes foundation application flawless. Smashbox Photo Finish Primer is my absolute fave. They should be hiring me as their spokesperson for all the friends I’ve turned on to this stuff! Don’t be afraid of the price, one tube lasts me about a year.
Tip #2 – Use foundation instead of concealer.
There’s no need to buy a separate product to use as a concealer. Most of them are too cakey and the wrong color for your skin. After applying primer, dot foundation around your nose, under eyes and on any other area that needs evened out. Use a make-up sponge to blend it, working from the center of your face outward. L’Oreal’s True Match Lumi Healthy Luminous Makeup has lightweight buildable coverage and three ingredients that help to improve skin clarity and tone.
Tip #3 – Blend a sparkly shadow into the corners of eyes to look more awake.
First, swipe a sparkly champagne color over lids then apply a small amount to corners of eyes. Use a darker neutral for the crease (taupe to chocolate brown) and highlight brow bone with the champagne shade. My favorite sparkly champagne shade is Bobbi Brown’s Champagne Quartz. It reflects light beautifully without being too over the top.
Tip #4 – Applying contour is just as important as blush.
Contouring with a bronzer and blush gives a natural glow and enhances facial features. I use a blusher/bronzer duo for this step. First, swipe the bronzer onto cheekbones, on temples and down the bridge of your nose, where sunlight would naturally hit. Smile, then swirl a pinkish or coral blush onto apples of cheeks and blend out toward ears. I’m in love with this $3 Contouring Blush and Bronzer Duo by ELF, the colors are amazingly natural and have a subtle sheen.
Tip #5 – Use eye shadow to line eyes.
I use dark eye shadow from my palette for my eye liner. It creates a softer line and is easier to control than a pencil. Use a very thin brush or the point of an applicator. Dampen it slightly then dip it in the eye shadow color of your choice. Some of my favorite colors to line with include navy blue, turquoise, plum, chocolate brown and gray. Line both upper and lower lash lines. The darker shades in my Smashbox Master Class Palette are perfect for this. A skinny eyeliner brush is included in the set.
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It’s time to link up your beauty posts for this week’s Beauty Buzz link up. Join me along with Lulu of Simply Lulu Style, Nicole of MomTrends and Janise of Mama in Heels to connect, share and sparkle!
